Brad Bird

REMY, c'est moi? It's hard not to think that when meeting Brad Bird, "Ratatouille's" writer-director. He thoroughly identifies with his rat protagonist Remy, who yearns to be a chef in the heretofore unwelcoming kitchen of the legendary French restaurant Gusteau. Remy, an unsung artist with a sensational sense of smell, is a misfit in his tribe of rats.

ARTIST 1. Eric Fischl was all smiles at LACMA's opening celebration of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum on Feb. 9, where the glitterati -- Tom! Katie! -- came out in droves. But the true VIPs of the night: billionaire philanthropist 2. Eli Broad and wife Edythe, whose $60-million donation gave the Los Angeles County Museum of Art a much-needed home for contemporary art. Guests, decked out in gowns and tuxes, peeped 200 works from postwar artists, including Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and 3. Cindy Sherman, who toasted her inclusion with former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne.

WHEN Brad Bird was brought in to take over "Ratatouille," a new movie about -- \o7sacre bleu!\f7 -- a rodent in a five-star Parisian restaurant, he immediately took issue with the rats. They were all wrong. To begin with, they were walking around on two legs. And they had short tails. "They were trying to \o7deratify\f7 the rats," Bird said of the animators who were working on the Pixar/Disney film before he came on board.

Show up and be yourself -- and get paid to do it. That's the job description Patton Oswalt accepted when he was cast as the lead voice in the new Pixar/Disney film, "Ratatouille." The film revolves around a rat named Remy (Oswalt) who dreams of becoming a master chef at a five-star restaurant in Paris. The voice of Remy had been difficult to cast, but then one day writer-director Brad Bird heard a routine of Oswalt's on the radio. "I was talking about the Black Angus Steak House....

"The Incredibles," a fable about a family of superheroes, beat out "Shark Tale" and "Shrek 2" to win the Oscar for best animated feature. Writer-director Brad Bird thanked "the holy trinity" of Pixar Animation Studios -- chief Steve Jobs, President Ed Catmull and its animation guru, John Lasseter -- for "making the greatest studio on the face of the Earth." The victory is a vindication for fresh-faced Bird, who's knocked around Hollywood for decades as a "potential" animation wonder.

Poor Bob Parr. Not too long into the opening of the new animated film "The Incredibles," the man formerly known as the superhero Mr. Incredible has become a faceless corporate drone -- consigned to the quietly humiliating life of a powerless insurance adjuster.